Oh, hang on…have you noticed that it’s all nonsense? I think that’s part of the point. But I quite agree that if you’re trying to invent a satire of religion that’s supposed to be better than the genuine article, it would be nice if it didn’t perpetuate the social poison of the patriarchy.

Perhaps it’s time for another New Revelation…uh-oh. I just felt the influence of pasta in my belly — the carbohydrates are reaching my brain, and telling me…telling me…there is to be no afterlife in the doctrine of the FSM. We live, we die, and we’re supposed to drink our beer now, not in some magical fantasy land outside this paradise his Noodliness created for us. And this world is for men and women, transgender people and asexuals, and for gay and straight people.

Whoa, head rush. So that’s what it’s like to be a prophet. Now obey me, or we’ll have to, uh, well, ask me later, after I’ve had some carbs to fuel my prophesyin’.

You wrote,
“Oh, hang on…have you noticed that it’s all nonsense? I think that’s part of the point. But I quite agree that if you’re trying to invent a satire of religion that’s supposed to be better than the genuine article, it would be nice if it didn’t perpetuate the social poison of the patriarchy.”

I never got the impression that the flying spaghetti monster was supposed to be better than the real thing. It was simply meant to be a parody of Creationism. The Beer Volcano and Stripper Factory are supposed to be a joke.

There’s probably something to be said about enjoying satire while also recognizing its more problematic aspects. I laughed years ago at the stripper factory, and I can see why it might be a problem. Although to truth be told, I no longer enjoy FSM humor simply because it’s really old and worn out.

I’ve always thought the stripper factory was just a secular riff on the whole 72 virgins concept – that it was making fun of the concept of getting to heaven and receiving a bunch of people who only exist for your sexual pleasure (hence them being mass produced in a factory). I never thought of it as commentary on actual strippers and their agency, but just ludicrous satire.

I can see why you might try to argue it’s problematic, but oddly I see it as actually being feminist. And hilarious.

I thought the stripper factory was a clever parody of the whole “72 Virgins” thing. I do see how continued speculation about FSM Heaven fosters thinking in sexist stereotypes, even though I think it was actually kinda good that it was sexist to begin with. I thought the whole point was that it was a parody of existing religions with no more evidence than existing religions.

I can see where people would get that the stripper factory is riffing on the 72 virgins thing but to me it seems kind of like the whole Nutnot “ladybits are objectively gross” thing. What he wrote was indistinguishable from things actual misogynists actually think and for that reason it fails as satire. Similarly, to my ears (eyes?) anyway, the stripper factory is indistinguishable from something your garden variety sexist dudebro would see as an objectively good, or at least harmless, thing and thus also fails as satire.

I never really thought the whole FSM thing was all that funny, so I didn’t really read all the associated stuff all that carefully. I can see both sides of this issue, but overall I’m not fond of the idea of a stripper factory. What would be even scarier is a Stryper factory.

We can ask of the stripper factory: Did people laugh at it because it was terribly cringe-inducing, or because it sounded stupidly awesome? The fact that it accompanied a beer volcano suggests the latter. A beer volcano is pretty silly, but underneath that it’s also awesome, because, you know, lots of beer.

I remember being amused by the whole FSM thing some time ago, mostly because it was so good at winding up the more conservative religious types by mocking the weirdness of their beliefs so effectively. I also remember joking that, as a teetotaler, I would have problems with enjoying a beer fountain, only to be playfully informed (I forget by whom) that I would be magically cured of this ‘tragic affliction’ by the FSM’s noodley embrace.

And that is all well and good, but the disturbing part is that the whole misogynistic ‘stripper factory’ thing and the homophobic stuff about the orientation-specific invisibility of male strippers just passed me by. I don’t even remember it at all, which may mean that I never saw it, or more worryingly, means that I saw it but never saw it as a problem, to the extent that I don’t even remember it – oblivious straight male privilege in the driving seat As Louis mentions @ 4, the standard you walk past is the standard you support.

While I can see Jen’s and Ace of Sevens arguments about this perhaps being originally conceived as a means of mocking the weirdness of Abrahamic faiths with regard to the stripper factory and beer fountain referencing the 72 vigins and rivers of wine from islam, that still doesn’t explain the ‘male strippers invisible to straight guys’ thing. I can’t think of a religious heaven trope that this could be lampooning – it seems to be straightforward homophobia born of unexamined heterosexual privilege to me.

It does seem like the whole FSM/Pastafarianism things has somewhat outlived its usefulness and is becoming toxic. It might be best to accept that it has problematic elements and let it fall by the wayside rather than reflexively defending it for no good reason other than the fact that atheists created it, and we don’t want to admit that atheists also have unexamined privilege or can simply be bigoted.

Of course, that is one big advantage that Pastafarianism has over actual religions – we can just let the whole thing go without any need for holy wars, religious pogroms, or a failing church enacting centuries of brutal oppression while its authority slowly crumbles around the collective ears of its clergy, some of whom use the last dregs of the privilege and standing that their clerical status offers them to cover up an epidemic of priestly child rape…

I hate to sound like a “what about the menz” type, but there are male strippers too. Magic Mike, anyone?

There’s no reason the stripper factory only produces one type of stripper.

This is true, but when someone says ‘stripper’, what is the first image that pops into the minds of most people, especially most straight, male people, who do afterall make up the majority of the better known voices within the whole FSM thing?

It isn’t Magic Mike, now is it?

There is also the fact that acts like Magic Mike and the Chippendales tend to have a certain element of comedy to them. As can be seen from the movie The Full Monty, there is an attitude that male strippers are an oddity, something vaguely ridiculous to be laughed at. The attitude toward women strippers is altogether different. It is a major component of the sex industry that makes a lot of money and is taken very seriously, and infamously can often chew through the women who work in it very quickly indeed.

This ‘there are always more where they came from’ mentality is being, whether intentionally or not, mimicked by the ‘stripper factory’ concept, that replicates the notion that women who undertake this kind of work are somehow a disposeable class of person, good for the entertainment of men and little else. That is pretty problematic, and even if it was not the intention of those who dreamed the idea up, we often say here that ‘intent is not magic’.

We wouldn’t let theists or woo-mongers get away with saying that they didn’t really mean the misogyny their beliefs promoted. We really have to hold ourselves to at least the same standard if we wish to be taken seriously.

It satirizes the arbitrary nature of religious prescriptions/proscriptions. Bobby Henderson’s original open letter to the Kansas School Board asks that FSM creationism be given equal time in the classroom, and underscores the absurdity with:

Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done…[t]he concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.

There’s also a jab at Bad Science, in the famous graph that charts the correlation between global warming and dearth of pirates.

FSM isn’t going away, regardless of what any one person may think of its continuing utility. So this is an opportunity to add one more layer to the joke: Many flavors of Xtianity, and religion in general, are all about Eternal, Unchanging Truths… which just happen to shift when the winds of the cultural zeitgeist blow in a different direction (see also: Xtianity’s changing historical level of support for slavery, for example). So as Our Lord Poopyhead said—it’s time for a New FSM Revelation! A new Truth, which will of course be just as Eternal and Unchanging as the old Truth it’s replacing! We have always been at war with Eastasia…
The Stripper Factory is actually part of FSM Hell. As part of the manufacturing process, each stripper-to-be is provided with the soul of someone who, on Earth, was a PUA or otherwise was a jerk to women.

I will point out that the “stripper factory” in FSM mythology didn’t just turn out female strippers. It also turned out male strippers, for those who leaned that way. At least that was how it was explained to me back when I was posting on Veganza.

Not sexist in my opinion, but still a somewhat degrading idea.

The Beer Volcano on the other hand…

BTW…it was also explained that there was no Pastafarian Hell. Everyone went to Heaven. It was just that the non-believers had to do the dishes after the party.

I’m a bit mixed on this. When it started, I used to tell people that my stripper factory produced the Johnny Depp and KD Lang model robots (now I say David Tennant & Rachel Maddow). Recognised as problematic, and subverted – BAM! Robots! POW! Bisexual! BIFF!

So I agree it’s a problem. But I also think that the idea has escaped so far into the wild that we cannot possibly retire it. It’s way beyond the power even of the feminazistasi FfTB groupthinker cabal and the tentacled mangina overlord to withdraw from the internet. It’s even beyond the power of Rebecca Watson, hard as that may be to believe The best option seems to me to expand the joke and add a new revelation. Santa Sheila Marinara (aka plain Sheila), commenting on Ashley’s post, was in before PZ. DEEP RIFTS!!!

I always read it pretty much as Jen did. Of course a parody of heaven has repulsive features which cater to what a bunch of theocratic shitheads would want.

A beer volcano is pretty silly, but underneath that it’s also awesome, because, you know, lots of beer.

Yeah, but you know, underneath the awesomeness it’s a volcano, which is one of the most threatening methods of beer distribution I can imagine. Maybe beer hurricanes or beer tsunamis would be more destructive, or FSM could “bless” everyone with a catastrophic global flood of beer. Fine, whatever. But it’s hardly the most benign way of doing it.

So I agree it’s a problem. But I also think that the idea has escaped so far into the wild that we cannot possibly retire it.

We certainly can’t expunge it from the internet like it never was – as you say, it is out there now. The meme is established, and people will keep referencing it no matter what we do. But that doesn’t mean that we have to continue associating ourselves with it or defending it. There is still the option of accepting that there are problematic elements within the whole idea, and explicitly rejecting those.

The best option seems to me to expand the joke and add a new revelation.

That might work as a means of rejecting the problematic bits, but as you say, the idea of pastafarianism now really has its own momentum, and has spread far beyond atheist and rationalist groups. We have lost whatever control of the concept we may once have had, and it seems likely that we now lack the ability to redefine its meaning as it is commonly employed. If that is the case, then making it clear that we are cognisant of the problems within the idea, and distancing ourselves from it, may be the best we can manage. The last thing we want to do is convey the impression that somehow ‘saving’ the trope for our own use is more important than showing our support for the groups that have suffered ‘splash damage’ courtesy of the current, toxic elements of its formulation.

The FSM was one of my first dealings with internet atheism. I moved on from there to Talk Origins, PT, WEIT, and here. You can poke and complain all you want, but I think the FSM serves as a useful step for getting here.

…kinda like how Santa Claus is a useful step for teaching children to believe in non existent, invisible entities that knows and all sees all, serves the interests of religion. There are many paths to getting this far, the FSM is one of many stops along the way, or was for me anyway. I did not notice at the time any sexist issues, maybe I wasn’t really looking, but nothing jumped up and struck me as over a line at that time. I took the whole thing as satire, and an interesting way to give fundamentalists a taste of their own lousy medicine.

Just for the record, my lack of belief had been pretty well forged long before I encountered the FSM, but the FSM really opened up the can of internet atheism. Which I am extremely grateful for btw. That was the beginning of my understanding of the atheist internet community. Finally, I had people I could relate to. Never met any of you, wouldn’t know you if I saw you, but it nice to know there are others out there, like me.

Who has the rights to it? Petition them to re-release it with the sexist bits omitted or re-written to be more obviously satirical. If anyone complains just state, that unlike other stale religions, the Followers of the FSM can move with the times.

You could call it “The Good News Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster”

I really love the original Open Letter. The concept of FSM was one of my first little exposures to atheism in general – certainly it strengthened my preferences for secularism and the separation of church and state.

But when I bought the “gospel” book that was written (and which I still have), I got to that part and winced. I didn’t like it, but it was one of those incidental bits of sexism that we’re all just used to dealing with.

Whatever you feel about the stripper factory part, the “non-homo” bit is no bueno. That just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

IMO the thing about the parodying of the 72 virgins is plausible, but not very convincing on its own. However, like someone else said, if you take the rivers of wine of Islamic paradise and beer volcano then it does make more sense.

I’ll throw my lot in with criticaldragon, Jen, etc. Pastafarianism was never supposed to be better than real religions; it was supposed to be just as bad. People are letting themselves be offended by satire.

There is no conflict between the between the IPU and the FSM. The IPU set the primordial chaps into vibration with Her contradictory attributes. Some of those vibrations formed into the Cosmic Pasta and the FSM was born.

@mythbri: To me it seems like the fact that it’s all facetious does make it nothing. I’ll admit I haven’t read the book, but if it has the same tone as the letter then the sexism and homophobia aren’t meant to be taken seriously and are just a satirical reflection of those themes as found in real religion. They’re very much intended to be a point of ridicule, but toward the faiths that genuinely preach such things, not the fake one that apes them.

That’s not how I read it – the “gospel” book is all about how Pastafarianism is better than all of the other untrue religions out there. It even has “commandments,” which are actually “I’d rather you didn’ts.”

It reads like a “gospel” based on a meme that came from a really amusing, incisive Open Letter attempting to persuade people not to “teach the controversy.” One that was written by a straight white college-age male. And that’s exactly what it is.

And yes, it’s satire, but that doesn’t mean that Henderson wasn’t lacking in certain kinds of awareness. Would he write the same thing now? I don’t know. Perhaps, perhaps not. People can write satire and still be tone-deaf to certain things.

@mythbri: Even if the book said that Pastafarianism was better than other religions, the fact that it’s a sarcastic book about a sarcastic religion would suggest that Henderson doesn’t necessarily believe that to be true.

But I suppose I’ll defer to you in the case of the book given that I haven’t read it and that you stand to have a better understanding of its tone.

I’m not saying that Henderson is homophobic or sexist – but he grew up in U.S. culture, just as I did, and int a position of relative privilege, just as I did.

In fact, I’m pretty sure (can’t lay my hands on the book at the moment) that there was something in his “I’d rather you didn’ts” that talked about not judging other people’s choices if they’re not hurting anyone, or something similar.

So while his intent was good, the “non-homo” thing is still problematic, and the “stripper factory,” as I said above, was not something I enjoyed. It was more eye-rolling than offensive.

So while his intent was good, the “non-homo” thing is still problematic, and the “stripper factory,” as I said above, was not something I enjoyed. It was more eye-rolling than offensive.

I don’t think it makes much sense to interpret it simply as being sincere. It’s a joke. It’s gotten old and isn’t all that funny anymore, but that isn’t the issue here. I’m trying to understand what this sort of thing means:

What do you suppose people would keep? They wouldn’t keep a belief that Pastafarian heaven is real (since no one does believe it), but they would at least be implicitly accepting the claim that… what? They really do think it would be a perfectly good sort of afterlife (“nothing wrong with it”), or at least better than other religions’ versions of the afterlife? Why is it that it can’t be mocking ostensibly-good afterlives on the grounds of how absurd, parochial, authoritarian and unethical they all are?

I mean, it makes as much sense to talk about how it’s glorifying pirates, who are known for raping, pillaging, etc., or the creepy stuff about being touched by a noodly appendage. So we shouldn’t “condone” that sort of thing in our fake religions. Fair enough, I guess … but who was condoning any of it in the first place? Sure, some people do want stuff like 72 virgin slaves in heaven or hate gays or whatever, but they’re not in on the joke. They’re the ones being targeted by it. Maybe it goes over their heads, but that’s not something you can avoid if satire is actually going to hit the mark.

I agree that there should be a new revelatory chapter added to the gospel of the FSM. I’d like it to be written from the point of view of one of the products of this “stripper factory” and her fight to be seen as human. At the end, she meets the FSM and convinces it to repudiate the sexism, misogyny, and homophobia in its book.

Imagine — a deity that can be reasoned with and will admit it was wrong!

When I say I don’t get the pirate thing, I don’t mean I don’t get the parody of arbitrarily special religious clothing. It’s the specific (“abitrary”) choice of pirate gear. Pirates are, in general, murderous rapey sociopaths and afaik always have been. ha ha.

Yeah, I get a lot of the criticism here. Old joke, written by white dudebro who was also making fun of misogynist religious bigots, but perhaps didn’t think through some of his satire. But I think you’re wrong, pastafarianism isn’t something you can revise or retire. You have to live it. Just as the pasta boils, so does the stripper factory produce sex-neutral, bi-curious and squid strippers, and work-hours of factory staff are good (and Aaaargh!). Noodly appendages touch, and pirate garb must be worn. Those who do not wish to partake of beer will suddenly find that “it’s really good after the second pint”.

As far as I know, it’s a heavily gendered term, and a profession that is really stigmatized for women. Not that there aren’t male strippers, of course, but I think it strains credulity to say that it’s not gendered.